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The purpose of this paper is to describe the characteristics of perpetrators of occupational fraud and their effects on organizations.

The study is based on a 2006 occupational fraud web survey conducted in Canada by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) using a multivariate regression analysis to explain the effect of perpetrators' characteristics on fraud losses.

The authors' analyses show that the perpetrator's position (i.e. employee, manager, executive/owner), gender, education level and the presence of accomplices (i.e. collusion) appear to affect fraud losses when analyzed separately. However, only the perpetrator's position and collusion are statistically significant when controlling for the potential correlation among explanatory factors.

This study contributes to academia and the anti‐fraud profession by measuring the statistical effect of perpetrators' characteristics on fraud losses while controlling for the potential correlation among these characteristics.

This study is useful to regulatory agencies and anti‐fraud professionals because it provides information about the characteristics of perpetrators of occupational fraud, who are more likely to be associated with larger frauds, thus pinpointing where prevention and detection efforts may be most effective.

This paper is based on proprietary data owned by the ACFE and is the first to analyze the statistical significance of the characteristics of perpetrators of occupational fraud in Canada.

This study aims to examine the roles of organisational control, structure, culture and technology in preventing occupational fraud. This study is essential in the current time. It brings a significant impact on both theory and practice. In the existing studies, there is a lack of clarity on a specific mechanism to prevent organisational fraud. The problem is that they tend to generalise the types of organisational fraud. Conceptually, organisational fraud may include corruption, double funding, asset misappropriation, bribery or falsification of documents. However, many scholars tend to neglect such diversities. Consequently, many occupational fraud cases become unstoppable, particularly corruption. To deal with this topical issue, the current study applies the term “occupational fraud” cited by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, consisting of corruption, asset misappropriation and fraudulent financial statement.

This study surveyed three Indonesian Local Governments. This study focussed on management levels that have strong power for coordinating governmental activities. The author chose these local governments because their local leaders (the regents) were jailed due to corruption scandals. As expected, this study gives us different perceptions of how fraud mitigation should be designed in the organisation.

The results suggest that corruption is a little bit complex than other types of occupational fraud. It is improbable to be prevented through technological and administrative approaches. As such, organisations need to think of extra efforts that could perfectly tailor the organisational control and organisational culture, organisational structure and technological advancement. The benefit of this effort is related to diagnosing the fit or misfit of organisation designs in addressing the dynamic dimensions of corporate governance. Then, it can also strengthen the efficacy of preventive measures to deal with occupational fraud.

This study provides a provocative discussion regarding the public perception of occupational fraud, consisting of corruption, asset misappropriation and financial statement fraud. And this study also offers a new refined conceptual analysis of how to deal with such types of occupational fraud by incorporating contingency theory and the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO’s) internal control components.

This paper aims to explore the contributions that public sector audit through reforms can make in dealing with the issues of occupational fraud in Ghana.

The issues surrounding the Ghana Audit Service (GAS) reports issued to parliament were reviewed using socio-legal methodology. The discussion as well as the theoretical contribution is informed by stakeholder theory.

The findings show matching of irregularities as reported by regular audit reports to schemes of occupational fraud and abuse as well as how the power to surcharge and disallow would serve as a deterrence mechanism in the fight against occupational fraud.

This paper concludes with discussions on specific requirements including the use of fraud investigators and modern forensic techniques in a collaborative effort with guidelines from the Supreme Audit Institution to minimise fraud.

This study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to explore the role of GAS in minimising occupational fraud.

This study examines the association between emotional intelligence (EI) and the tendency of future accountants to rationalize and engage in occupational fraud.

The study adopts a survey methodology and uses a questionnaire containing a fraud scenario and EI construct to gather data from 225 participants. It performed a Cronbach alpha to assess the measurement parameters consistency of EI and fraud tendency and employed Pearson correlation and regression analysis to test its hypothesis.

The study found that future accountants in Nigeria are emotionally intelligent and have a high fraud tendency. Also, it found a significant and positive association between EI and fraud tendency, suggesting that future accountants that are emotionally intelligent have a higher tendency to rationalize and engage in occupational fraud. In addition, the study found that academic intelligence, a control variable, positively associates with fraud tendency.

The study offers rare insights into the fraud tendency of future accountants, which would benefit the counter fraud community in Nigeria and other developing countries. Recruiters and employers will find the study beneficial in decision-making on job recruitment, placements and moral orientation for prospective accountant employees.

The study is the first to directly associate EI with the fraud tendency of future accountants from a developing country with high fraud profile and underdeveloped counter fraud strategy. Thus, it provides a benchmark for future studies in other developing countries.

This paper aims to present the findings of a study examining fraud in the workplace setting, principally in the Australasian context. Although prior research into occupational fraud is conceptually rich, there is a lack of empirical evidence of this important but elusive problem.

Based on investigative data from 14 participating firms, the paper provides insights into the gender breakdowns and stated motivations of offenders. The paper also provides evidence of the number of investigations, interviews and reports to law enforcement in these firms.

The study finds that genders are evenly balanced for most firms, with females significantly outnumbering males in banking firms. Self-imposed financial hardship was the most popular motivator. Of the number of admissions to wrongdoing, only half were subsequently reported to law enforcement.

Particularly complex or advanced types of occupational fraud may go unreported or undetected: as a result, the figures presented in this study may be incomplete. Reported figures are based largely on historical data provided by respondents, and the authors are unable to report accurate details of the respondent firms. This makes it difficult to determine the frequency of offending against the background population.

Investigators should continue to look for changes in the life circumstances of their staff. Such changes will give an indication of instances of staff living beyond their means and the sudden financial pressures that can compel occupational fraud. Instead of trying to supervise staff to an impractical degree, managers and proprietors would be well advised to be alert to the kind of pressures that their staff might experience.

Social control and detection measures are likely to be easier to implement and less invasive than technical controls. The study provides additional pressure to update traditional conceptualisations of the male white collar offender. While male offenders were responsible for larger losses per case, females were more numerous in the summary offence data.

Gaining insights into the problem of employee fraud and white collar crime is difficult. The authors’ contribution in this paper is to provide empirical insights into the makeup of white collar offenders, including insights on gender.

The purpose of this paper is to explore pathways to fraud perpetrated in accounting-related roles, focusing both on situationally driven attitudes and contextual elements.

Drawing on an anomie-based criminological taxonomy developed by Waring et al. (1995) and Weisburd and Waring (2001), which highlights individual attitudes and situational elements and their connection to illegitimate behaviour, the authors perform a qualitative content analysis of available media and court-reported information on a hand-collected database of 192 accountant frauds in Australia during the period 2001-2011.

The analysis highlights four distinct pathways to accountant fraud – crisis responders, opportunity takers, opportunity seekers and deviance seekers – and the relative distribution of identified cases among these pathways. It also identifies the prevalence of gambling, female offenders, small and medium enterprises as victims, as factors in fraud, as well as the relatively unsophisticated methods in much accountant fraud. In addition, it establishes the importance of situational attitude in moderating inherent character as it relates to fraudulent behaviour and the variable importance of the fraud triangle elements across the pathways to accountant fraud.

This paper provides direct evidence on the nature and pathways to accountant fraud, thus improving understanding of a significant category of occupational fraud. The evidence challenges conventional characterisations of accountant fraud offenders in prior research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Toshiba’s fraudulent financial reporting in relation to the fraud diamond (pressure, opportunity, rationalisation and capability).

A quantitative empirical research, analysing secondary data from Toshiba’s published annual reports before restatement, from 2008–2014 has been used. A simultaneous equations approach was used to test the hypothesis. Excel software was used to analyse secondary data and to carry out correlation analysis and descriptive statistics analysis.

This study uncovers evidence that pressure proxied by return on assets (ROA), the opportunity proxied by ineffective monitoring (BDOUT), rationalisation proxied by audit opinion (AO) and capability proxied by board member changes (BCHANGE) had moderate to strong relationship to financial statement fraud (FSF) (proxied by Beneish M-score model). However, ROA has a negative and significant effect on Toshiba’s FSF. BDOUT, AO and BCHANGE have positive and significant effect on Toshiba’s FSF. Furthermore, there is no multicollinearity problem within the four variables. Overall, this study has statistically proven that all dimensions of fraud diamond are required for the explanation of Toshiba’s accounting scandal.

Although a few studies discuss the four dimensions (fraud diamond), none, to our surprise, exists which explain the circumstances led Toshiba’s high-level executives to commit fraud. This study is the first thorough investigation of Toshiba’s accounting scandal that uses all four dimensions to explain Toshiba’s FSF.

Cressey’s Fraud Triangle has been referenced in 8,584 studies and academic papers [1] and is a stalwart of training courses for accounting and audit practitioners and fraud investigators. The Fraud Triangle has endured for three decades in the academic and practitioner worlds. This study aims to explore the origins of Cressey’s Fraud Triangle and challenge its practical value to a fraud investigator.

This study has developed from analysis of a targeted literature review carried out as part of a wider study into occupational fraud and corruption.

Cressey’s name is intrinsically linked to the Fraud Triangle, although he never used the expression during his lifetime. Two of the three motivational factors identified by Cressey (1953) were developed from the earlier work of Svend Riemer (1941), who it is suggested should have equal billing with Donald Cressey for the concepts that led to the creation of the Fraud Triangle.

The paper illustrates the limitations of Cressey’s Fraud Triangle for practitioners.

Many academics and researchers have either misunderstood Cressey’s role in the development of the Fraud Triangle or been unaware of its true origins. Although the pioneering work of Riemer is referenced in a 2014 study on the Fraud Triangle by Alexander Schuchter and Michael Levi, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to identify the influence of Riemer on Cressey’s thinking and the development of the Fraud Triangle.

In recent years, Public Accountability and Integrity have been matters of growing attention, both in the public and private sector, as citizens demand value for money entrusted to the governments through their taxes. In addition, in many countries, after the recent recession, government budgets and corporate returns have been reduced. Many corporate scandals have occasionally become known and have had a great impact on confidence in the market. Even worse, after the pandemic of COVID-19, «bare and exacerbated massive preexisting problems in the world’s economic, social and security order, threatens to push up to 100 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, struck at a time of dwindling trust in representative governance» (UNDP, 2020). The funds of organizations in the private and public sector have been shrinking, whereas the situational pressures of fraud are increased. In this context, Dorris, President and CEO of the ACFE warns for explosion of fraud in the coming years and reminds that during the 2008 economic, companies cut-off, non-revenue generating activities, such as the internal audit and the compliance departments leaving them exposed to fraud. Therefore, organizations have to do more with less. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of the fraud theory on the management’s perspective aiming to contribute to the efficient development of anti-fraud mechanisms

Having identified the fraud theory developed so far, we provide a framework for the fraud risk management.

This paper incorporates cost/benefits considerations, practical considerations and empirical evidence on fraud.

This paper provides valuable information to enable the management, who has the primary responsibility to prevent and detect fraud, to disclaim responsibility by broadening their understanding of fraud theory.

A number of highly publicised scandals such as Enron, Lehman Brothers, Parmalat, Satyam, Toshiba and 1MDB (to name a few) have heightened the awareness of the effects of fraudulent financial reporting. While enormous measures have been taken to curb the fraudulent activities among large and small businesses, the issues are still alarming worldwide. Thus, this study aims to explore the extent to which the prevalence of fraud risk in state-controlled companies and to enhance understanding of the underlying reasons of the fraudulent activities.

As this study is a descriptive and exploratory in nature, an exploratory case study method was used in four state-controlled companies. Using the fraud triangle theory to underpin this study, the qualitative face-to-face interviews were carried out with top management of the companies.

The study reveals a high risk of fraud occurrence at state-controlled companies that involve dealing with various suppliers, governments, customers and shareholders, even when standard operating procedures and rules and regulation are in place. The apparent reason for this phenomenon is attributed to not only opportunities but also incentives and rationalisations in engaging fraudulent activities.

As there are relatively few qualitative studies conducted in this area specifically among Malaysian state-controlled companies, this study extends the fraud literature by examining risk exposure and reasons underlying the fraudulent activities. The findings demonstrate that to a certain extent, the fraud triangle theory explains the motivations behind the fraudulent activities. The finding from this study is relevant to regulators, investors, companies and academicians in understanding, preventing and combating fraud.